Poorhouse Fair (6 page)

"Mr. Hook, have you seen a cat on the grounds?"

Hook's head moved not at all. In time he pronounced, "A cat with the one eye missing."

"Missing or shut. That's the one. It looked as though a car had struck him."

"Ah, isn't it a judgment, though, the way these highways are extermi-nating the wildlife? By the time you are as old as I am--not that I would wish such a fate on any-body-- the sight of a rabbit or squirrel will be as rare a treat as the glimpse of a passenger pigeon in my boyhood."

"How did the cat get within the wall?" Hook gave no evidence of hearing. "By rights, it shouldn't be alive at all. Pathetic-looking thing."

"They cling to life extra-ordinarily. My father had a female, Becky, whose hind legs were removed by the mower, yet she lingered another six months and furthermore bore a litter of kittens. But indeed I don't believe her suffering was worth it."

"That's my feeling."

Gregg, unnoticed, had come back from the kitchen with meat scraps wrapped in orange paper. Quick to see Conner, he hid the parcel behind a post of the porch and joined them, overhearing that they were talking of the cat. He had to brave it: "What's this about my cat?"

"Why yours?" Conner asked.

Then Hook hadn't told who had brought it within the wall.

Hook said serenely, "The animal has made a get-away."

"Have you seen it, Mr. Conner?" Gregg asked politely, and continued, less politely, "I guess the damn thing was coming to the fair."

"Yes, I saw it by the wall, and it ran past me. Someone, I think, should put it out of its misery."

"Or else put a tag around its neck," said Gregg, alluding too subtly to the nameplates on the porch chairs.

"What?" Conner had difficulty understanding the excited enunciation of this man.

"Probably it'll be the only goddam thing to come to the fair today, with the storm," Gregg went on, nearly crazy with his own boldness in the face of the fact of Conner's being right there. "If I could catch it," he cried, "I'd wring its f.ing neck."

"If a group of children were to find the animal," Hook spoke out of his memories, "they would make uncommon sport of him."

The idea sickened Conner, children soaking the dying animal with kerosene. He lacked most men's tolerance for cruelty, their ability to blur and forget rumors of it. He wondered if Gregg were ugly enough to make good his insane threat. Perhaps he was; a net of dark wrinkles had been thrown across his face, and his features seemed bright things caught in this net. Conner asked him, "Why would you harm the animal?"

Gregg was taken aback. In tides as variable as those of astrological influence, sense and caution flowed in and out of him; comparatively lucid, he realized he was facing the tyrant of the place and had been saying whatever came first to his tongue. Now Conner had taken him up, ready with a trap. "Why because," he answered, inspired, "it spreads disease."

Conner blinked; this was true.

"Among chickens," Hook interceded, "I've seen the fever brought into the pen by a fox spread so there weren't a half dozen standing by morning."

"Yes, and to humans too," Gregg went on, cleverly sensing he had found a sore spot of Conner's. "Don't they carry typhoid? If Alice sees it, sure as s. she'll let the stinking thing play around in the kitchen." His eyes glinted, and he did a dance step, unable to keep his feet from jubilating.

The cat had not gone far, once it felt unpursued. While the men talked, it returned, having smelled the parcel Gregg had laid behind the porch pillar. Alice had not tied the parcel, so it had unfolded of itself. The scraps--pork, minced--smelled neutrally to the cat; he recognized them as life-stuff, unconnected with pleasure. Dutifully he nosed the chunks, searching for lean; his bowed grave head half-lost in the collar of upstanding orange paper.

"Look there," Gregg cried softly.

As the three men watched, the tomcat, jiggling his head, got the smallest piece between his teeth, on the side where they were not smashed. But the arc his jaw could make was too small for chewing, and the piece dropped back among the others. The thin yellow tail swished twice. For a moment he licked a hump of gray fat, then lost interest wholly, looked up, saw the men, bolted off the porch, and hobbled around the house into the shade.

"Who put the meat there?" Conner asked.

"I brought a little up from the kitchen," Gregg admitted, thinking that now he was in for it.

Conner realized how badly he had misjudged the man; the culpability of the distrust he bore these powerless old people, whom complete material deprivation had not deprived of the capacity for such acts of kindness, was borne upon him. He wished there were some feasible way of abasing himself before Gregg, and he tried to compress all the affection and humility he felt into the gentle-spoken, "I'm afraid it's beyond help."

Relieved to hear in the tone that he would not be punished for trespassing into the kitchen, Gregg did not comprehend the point of Conner's words.

BUDDY, feeling jilted--especially so when, less than an hour after Conner left, sunlight drained it seemed forever from the windows of the cupola--became unable to bear his solitude, and started downstairs, in Conner's cold tracks. The twin had an unspoken terror of being alone, terror so keen that, abandoned, he unwillingly animated dead things --the green steel cabinets, the buried piano, the upright objects on Conner's desk top. These summoned presences intimidated him; he expected at every moment the window to smack its lips and the water cooler to gurgle uproariously. The stairs themselves had a dreadful capacity of closing, the walls meeting the instant before he gained the broad landing. The bannister uprights and their shadows rapidly criscrossed in a secret conversation that grew shriller as the speed of his descent increased. He broke into the open air of the porch flushed, under the eyes of several inmates, with the pink blank beauty of a Greek sculptor's boy.

Happily Conner was looking for him. His superior was walking down the porch, beside the receding bright-tagged chairs. "Buddy. Good. Are you busy?"

"I came down ... the soft drink truck might arrive. He came last year before noon."

"There's a diseased cat on the grounds. The thing's in pain and should be killed."

"You're sure?"

"That's a curious question; I'm fairly sure of what I see, yes." He glanced up nervously at the blackened half of the sky. "I'm going back up until noon."

To Buddy it seemed that today Conner was always escaping him. It was the work of the fair; the decrepits had everything their way today. He protested aloud, "What do these people want a holiday for, every day is a holiday for them?"

Conner didn't answer him, except by describing where last he had seen the animal, and the direction in which it had run.

BLOND and teenage, Ted, the driver of the soft drink truck, hummed a Spanish tune in duet with the radio:

"Eres nińo y has amor,

qué farás cuando mayor?"

It was mostly what you got on the radio now. Ted even got a little tired of all this Latin stuff. Every other movie star was a Cuban or mestizo or something, as if you had to be brown to look like anything. Some guys he knew wore "torero" pigtails standing up from the back of their heads and sprayed their hair with perfumed shellac. Ted'd be damned if he'd do this. They could call him a Puritan all they wanted.

Turning into the curved road, the asphalt of the edges crumbling into grass, Ted had a creepy sensation of heading into death's realm. The county itself was out in nowhere --farm stuff. A poorhouse in the middle of it was twice as bad. From a Spanish movie Ted had seen he remembered a scene showing skeletons trying to get a young man and turn him into one of them. Ted wanted to get out of this territory fast. He had another delivery before lunch, twenty miles away, not far from his home and near a luncheonette where the girls from high school, including his, gathered to eat pizza and BarBQs. He had fixed his delivery schedule so he could be there when she was; having juggled the list made him nervous. He wasn't sure there was time enough if this took long. He wasn't even sure he could find the damn place. In the movie the idea was that after you die you're not really dead until a year or so and a scientist right before he died took a drug so he would be able to walk around. Then this colony of dead people he founded had to get the body of a young man or woman every eleven days and until they needed to eat them kept them in a cave. This young guy and girl were in there together and they fell in love. These two lying chained in the cave brought Ted to thinking of his girl, Rita, and of Rita's belly, which she had shown him the night before last. She belonged to some girls' secret club in Newark called the Nuns where they took vows not to let men touch them. But if they wanted they could let men see sections. She had often undone her blouse before, but the night before last was the first time she had lifted her skirt and slid her silver pants down and lay there on the back seat of the car while he kneeled beside her, his hands folded in obedience at his chest. Her eyes and mouth, three shadows in a ghostly face, looked up at him kind of sadly while below, even paler and more luminous, the great naked oval between her waist and the middle of her thighs held in its center one black shadow. Remembering seeing it, the true thing, chased away all the skeletons of that lousy movie.

Finding the place turned out to be easy. He drove under some trees and the land opened up and there it was on the left: a hell of a big yellow house back from a wall. Old people were crawling around like bugs on the lawn. To give them something to talk about he speeded, squeezing the brakes on just at the entrance, so all the cases piled high behind him clattered in gallant style. The radio sang

"Será tan bivo su fuego,

que con importune ruego,

por salvar el mundo ciego--"

He switched off the ignition and with it the radio. "Hey. Amigos. Where does this stuff go?" He caught a look at himself in the side mirror. A brownpaper cigarillo hung from his lips and his crushed cap was tilted steeply over his forehead. When he set his forearm on the sill his bracelet scratched on the steel.

"Where's Buddy?" one of the women asked nobody in particular. She had a thing growing around her neck as big as a bag of groceries: God. Ted hadn't known there was a garbage dump like this left in all of New Jersey. He even felt sorry for them, living to be so old. He hoped somebody shot him when he got to be thirty.

"Some-one re-sponsible had better fetch him," a tall gent said, not moving himself.

"Aah," a small crusty-looking one said, "what's the f.ing use? Buddy doesn't know his head from his a.h. Why do they order this p. anyway? Who in hell drinks it?" This one had a tongue in his head at least.

"Other years it goes under the trees," a woman said.

Ted asked, "What trees, seńora?"

The dirty-faced man broke in furiously, "The trees down there in the meadow, forty miles away. What the hell do you think, what trees? The trees there; Jesus what the hell is your company hiring dumb kids for?"

Ted's heart raced angrily. Though his girl and the distance he had to go to her pressed on his brain, he took his sweet time inhaling sour smoke and stared the dirt-face down. He saw himself at this moment as an elegant snake. "Si," he said at last, as if in the silence he had wrung a confession from his prey. His smile, he felt, was beautiful in its serenity. "And how do I get up there, old man? Fly?"

"Fly if you can; you look the type. If they can't hire anybody except little pansies why doesn't Pepsi-Cola give up? Want me to back it up for you? Fly!--did you hear him?" The other old people made no motion to control this nut; they acted like he was their spokesman.

Ted swung down from the cab. "Look dad," he said, "you're very good, but I don't have all day. A woman's waiting for me in Newark."

"You're from Newark? I know Newark. You ever live near Canby Street?"

"No," Ted said, and blushed lightly; the quick fawning overture had made him feel, in front of these people, big and vulnerable to ridicule and slow.

"Did you ever get a drink in a place called the Ten Spot, on John Street where the old trolley tracks used to curve? Lenny Caragannis used to run it."

"I don't remember...."

"Before your time? Or are you lily-pure?"

To Ted it seemed that with this sudden searching turn the man had penetrated through his presence backwards into the chambers of his life, and the few treasures there-- his mother's profile, the tolerant face of the brick wall across the alleyway from his bedroom window, Rita's skin glowing white around the cushion of tense hair--were exposed in their poverty.

Dirt-face drew very close. "Whyncha take me back with you? You're a tough kid. You're no company man, are you? You're not in love with the company. Let's go back together. Listen. This is a hell-hole of a dump. You know what they do? They put tags around your ears like pigs. Hook, the kid's going to take me back."

"He'll be sorely repri-manded if it is discovered," the tall one said.

"Come on," Ted pleaded, blushing more deeply, "how do I get this junk in?" He was addressing the others over Dirt-face's head.

"Back it up through the gate," the nut insisted, dancing and brushing against Ted's shirt, "right into the porch, and then we'll be off. You and me, kid. Bang. Bang."

"Is it wide enough?" Ted asked the tall man, who looked as though he had some authority.

"Last year they backed it through," a woman said. More old women and men were slowly gathering from everywhere.

"Now don't start to cry," the small man with the dirty-looking face said. "Why the f. does your company hire kids that can't drive even a kiddy-car? Can you only drive forward? Ram it into reverse."

Ted stepped away from him, plucked the tan butt from his mouth, let it drop at his feet, ground it into the gravel, and said effectively, "O.K."

"Slam her through, dump the p., and I'll get in the seat beside you and crouch down. Then step on it. Don't look back. Do you have a gun, kid?"